The Doomsday Clock is an internationally recognized design that conveys how close we are to destroying our civilization with dangerous technologies of our own making. First and foremost among these are nuclear weapons, but the dangers include climate-changing technologies, emerging... Read More

Today, more than 25 years after the end of the Cold War, the members of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Science and Security Board have looked closely at the world situation and found it so threatening that the hands of the Doomsday Clock must once again be set at three minutes to midnight.

Editor's note: Founded in 1945 by University of Chicago scientists who had helped develop the first atomic weapons in the Manhattan Project, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists subsequently created the Doomsday Clock in 1947 using the imagery of apocalypse (midnight) and the contemporary idiom of nuclear explosion (countdown to zero), to convey threats to humanity and the planet.

Last week, Israel's influential paper, Haaretz, led its front page with a rather decisive headline: "Israel rejects US-backed Arab plan for conference on nuclear-free Mideast." The problem, however, is that the country announced no such decision.

Seyed Hossein Mousavian, a lecturer and research scholar at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, is the highest-ranking member of Iran's political elite living in the United States. He has been a close adviser to many key Iranian figures across the political spectrum, ranging from the moderate former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and reformist former President Mohammad Khatami to conservative former speaker of parliament Ali Akbar Nategh-Nouri and the former chief nuclear negotiator and current head of the Iranian parliament, Ali Larijani.

History repeats itself, the saying goes, first as tragedy and then as farce. This characterization could readily be applied to the international community's efforts to negotiate a treaty banning the production of fissile material for nuclear weapons. A longstanding objective of the international community, the Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty (FMCT) has, tragically, never been the subject of even preliminary negotiations, as the nuclear powers that allegedly support it avoid taking any effective action on the treaty while, farcically, bemoaning its absence.

A few weeks ago, an anti-nuclear group breached security fencing at the Kleine Brogel Air Base in Belgium. Undetected, the group spent more than an hour on a military base where U.S. nuclear weapons are supposedly stored. Worse yet, they then uploaded to YouTube a video showing exactly how they exploited Kleine Brogel's security weaknesses.

Replace peace activists with terrorists and the results could be devastating.

Recently, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) projected that the global output of nuclear power will expand anywhere from 473 to 748 gigawatts by 2030. This expansion primarily will take place in countries with existing nuclear programs, but an additional 20 countries with no history of nuclear power are actively considering building reactors as well.

President Barack Obama recently spoke of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty's (NPT) importance, as has every president since Lyndon B. Johnson who signed the treaty in 1968. Yet they have all, to a lesser or greater degree, weakened the treaty, through lax enforcement, by carving out exceptions for certain countries, or by just ignoring it. We have come to the point now that North Korea, which signed the treaty in 1985, is now mocking it.

When the Bulletin last moved the hand of the Clock closer to midnight in January 2007, we noted our worries about what North Korea's nuclear arsenal might portend for future arms races in Northeast Asia and for further unraveling of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

Japanese security policy is at a crossroads, shifting from a traditional pacifist security policy to a more assertive security policy. As part of this shift, Tokyo is steadily moving toward the deployment of a more robust missile defense system, which the Japanese government doesn't think contradicts the country's "exclusively defensive defense" policy anyway. And while the debate about U.S. missile defense installations in Eastern Europe remains contentious, in East Asia, political debate about missile defense installations in Japan seems to be fading away.

The rising demand for energy, especially in Asia, has made it all but inevitable that a surge in the construction of new nuclear reactors will occur over the next 20 years. That will pose issues regarding the building of new uranium enrichment and reprocessing facilities or the expansion of existing facilities.1

The release of the declassified summary of the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) "Iran: Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities" on December 3, 2007 was an event of major political and strategic significance. Its conclusion with "high confidence" that Iran halted its military nuclear activities in fall 2003 removed, for the foreseeable future at least, any grounds for military action to prevent Tehran's further progress in the nuclear field. This outcome has been welcomed in many quarters in the United States and elsewhere, but it has also generated intense debate and some controversy.

The traditional concern about Iran's capability to deliver a nuclear weapon involves an Iranian ballistic missile that could reach the United States from Iran. Therefore, in this piece I describe the current state and expected time when Iran could achieve these capabilities on the basis of recent statements by U.S.

The commercial nuclear age started on December 2, 1957, when the Shippingport Atomic Power Station in Pennsylvania began operating--the first use of a nuclear power plant dedicated solely to peaceful purposes. Five months earlier, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was founded with a dual mandate--promote the peaceful uses of atomic energy and prevent its military uses. Ever since, the tension inherent in this mission has strained and constrained the application and evolution of IAEA safeguards.